Tag Archives: gallery

Iron Man Armor

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ironman-20x29

Iron Man Armor, green Sharpie on banner paper, 20″ tall by 29″ wide

This drawing of Iron Man, in green Sharpie on banner paper, was created at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014.  The finished drawing is 20″ tall by 29″ wide, nearly the entire width of the roll of paper.  The dimension refer to the drawing, not the sheet of paper.  The drawing took about four hours to complete.

I happened upon the picture of Iron Man from a SEGA video game while searching for something to draw.  I chose green for the drawing because, frankly, it was almost all I had left by the end of Maker Faire weekend.  As with several other drawings, I fiddled with the Inkscape “Trace Bitmap” function until I got a result I felt would come out nicely.  Rather than reducing the entire drawing to black and white shapes, as I did with the Serenity picture, I instructed the program to separate the drawing into several different colors, each in their own layer. Rather than shading each layer differently, as I did with the Fakegrimlock picture, I opted to just have the robot trace out each layer.

The result is that those areas of the drawing that are more “highlighted” are outlined concentrically several times.  There is some variation between each layer, which I would attribute to the servo cable getting caught on the edge of the paper or board while drawing.  Even so, I’m very happy with the result.

Harry Potter Hogwarts Crest

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hogwarts-25x20

Harry Potter Hogwarts Crest poster, blue Sharpie on banner paper, 25″ tall x 20″ wide

At this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 all of my robot drawings were done with the use of the pen lift mechanism.  This allowed me to create big awesome pictures in less time than it would have taken by using single line drawing techniques.  Although less ink is used, the use of the pen lift mechanism introduces a delay between each line.  This drawing of the Harry Potter Hogwarts Crest by Jmh20 took about two hours to finish.  The drawing is blue Sharpie on banner paper, 25″ tall x 20″ wide.  The dimensions refer to the drawing, not the sheet of paper.  

Drawing from scalable vector graphic formats sometimes takes a bit of extra setup.  In the case of this image, I removed several of the layers from the image.  The reason for deleting layers is that the robot will draw every edge of every layer – including those that mostly overlap with others.  This is why the raven’s wing and lion’s claw can be seen through the center of the crest.  Most of what I eliminated consisted of extra outlines.

This was the very last drawing I completed at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014.

Doctor Who “To Victory” Dalek Poster

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Doctor Who "To Victory" Dalek poster, red Sharpie on banner paper, 28" tall x 23" wide

Doctor Who “To Victory” Dalek poster, red Sharpie on banner paper, 28″ tall x 23″ wide

Another robot drawing from exhibiting at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013.  This is the result of my PlotterBot drawing a cropped version of the “To Victory” Dalek poster on the BBC website which was released with the “Victory of the Daleks” episode from 2010.  ((Those faithful readers of my blog posts may recall my other attempt to memorialize this same drawing))  This drawing is red Sharpie on banner paper, 28″ tall x 23″ wide.  The dimensions refer to the drawing, not the sheet of paper.  This drawing took about eight hours.

Unfortunately, this drawing was longer than the sheet of paper I had allocated for it.  You can see at the bottom of the drawing a white uncolored patch where the blue tape was covering the edge of the paper.  However, if you can get over that defect, this is still a cool poster – and the biggest drawing I had ever done up to that point.

Since this drawing was posted on the fence at Maker Faire 2013, rolled up, archived, unrolled, transported to Maker Faire 2014 where it was displayed again, you can see a little wrinkling of the paper at the edges.  As you can also see, the drawing went off the edge of the paper.

Game of Thrones House Stark Dire Wolf

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Game of Thrones House Stark Dire Wolf, red Sharpie on banner paper, 20″ tall x 28″ wide

This is one of my robot drawings from exhibiting at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013.  It is a robotic interpretation of the excellent “metallic Game of Thrones wallpaper” by Sasha Vinogradova.  This drawing is red Sharpie on banner paper, 20″ tall x 28″ wide.  The dimensions refer to the drawing, not the sheet of paper.  This drawing took about five hours.

I don’t remember why I chose red for this drawing, but this is another instance where I particularly like the effect of a large “blood red” mark at the end of the drawing.  I feel like it balances the negative space and leave a slight ominous tone. This is another wide drawing, though a little off center.  If I were to do this drawing over again, I would probably make it smaller.

Since this drawing was posted on the fence at Maker Faire 2013, rolled up, archived, unrolled, transported to Maker Faire 2014 where it was displayed again, you can see a little wrinkling of the paper at the edges.

Breaking Bad’s Walter White

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Breaking Bad's Walter White, blue Sharpie on banner paper, 14" tall x 29" wide

Breaking Bad’s Walter White, blue Sharpie on banner paper, 14″ tall x 29″ wide

This is one of my drawings from exhibiting at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013.  It features Breaking Bad’s Walter White sitting in a warehouse surrounded by bricks of cash.  The drawing is blue Sharpie on banner paper, 14″ tall x 29″ wide.  The drawing took about five hours to complete, because of all of the dark areas.

I chose the blue Sharpie for this drawing to echo the series’ famous “blue meth.”  I think it would have looked equally good in green1 or yellow.2  This one of my wider drawings – very nearly to the edge of each side of the sheet of paper, which is fairly difficult to do.  Since this drawing was started at the top left corner3 I couldn’t have been positive it would have finished within the left edge of the paper.  You can also see a dark spot at the bottom left where the pen soaked into the drawing for a bit before I picked up the pen.  Depending upon the drawing, I actually like this effect.

Since this drawing was posted on the fence at Maker Faire 2013, rolled up, archived, unrolled, transported to Maker Faire 2014 where it was displayed again, you can see a little wrinkling of the paper at the edges.

  1. Greed, envy, cash [↩]
  2. To call out the yellow hazard suit [↩]
  3. You can see how the drawing is darker at the top right, lighter at the bottom left [↩]

Tiny Drawing Robot Gallery

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Two R2D2's

Two R2D2’s

This last weekend, when I should have been working, I was having a blast drawing tiny drawings with my tiny drawing robot.  Under the kind and benevolent tutelage of TechNinja, I improved my Arduino and Processing sketches, started a repository for the software/firmware for the Tiny CNC drawing robot, and merged his pull request to add some code to make this little robot compatible with the CNC server software written to run the WaterColorBot and EggBot.

Above are probably the best drawings I’ve managed with my little robot to date.  The drawing is about 2 inches tall.  The one on the left is from a single “pass” of the drawing robot, the second is from the robot drawing the same picture three times in a row.  I was quite surprised that the robot was able to draw the same picture several times and repeat the drawing so well.

An image of a weeping angel is itself a weeping angel

An image of a weeping angel is itself a weeping angel

This drawing, of a weeping angel from Doctor Who, is also about 2 inches tall.  This image wasn’t the best topic to draw – but my daughter specifically requested it.  I found a full color JPG/bitmap picture online, imported it into Inkscape, and converted it into a single-color vector graphic for the robot.

A robot drawn robot turtle

A robot drawn robot turtle

This one is a drawing of a robot turtle, from the game “Robot Turtles.”  I pledged to help support this awesome game on Kickstarter and it arrived a little before Christmas.  While it didn’t get immediate attention on Christmas day, we played the game for the first time a few days later and my daughter loved it.  I think it was really smart to design the game with “unlockables” which give the game a gentle learning curve to start and a challenge later on right when the players start to get complacent.  I pulled the JPG/bitmap image from the Robot Turtles community page, turned it into a two-tone vector image using Inkscape, and fired the drawing robot.

I also tried to draw a Death Star, but it turned out terrible.  The SVG version of the image I found was terrible and the robot drawing was even worse.

Tiny CNC Drawing Robot
  1. An Itty Bitty Drawing Robot
  2. Tiny CNC Drawing Robot - Cost Estimate
  3. How to Build a Tiny CNC Drawing Robot
  4. Better video of Tiny CNC Drawing Robot actually drawing
  5. Design considerations with the Tiny CNC
  6. Uses for a Tiny CNC Robot
  7. Tiny CNC - An Experiment in Commerce
  8. Tiny CNC - now a 3 Axis CNC!
  9. Tiny CNC Software Update
  10. How to Build a Tiny 3-Axis CNC Drawing Robot
  11. Tiny 3-Axis CNC Drawing Robot - Software Update and Design version 0.29 postmortem
  12. Nine Drawing Robots On the Loose!
  13. Competing Design Ideals in a Drawing Robot
  14. Tiny Drawing Robot Updates, Incremental Progress, and More!
  15. The Tiniest Drawing Robot Actually Draws!
  16. Robot Friends: Tiny CNC and the WaterColorBot
  17. Tiny Drawing Robot Gallery
  18. TinyCNC Drawing Robot Software User Guide
  19. Drawing Robot AFRON 2013 Design Challenge Entry
  20. Drawing By Numbers
  21. TinyCNC - Working Keypad UI
  22. Don't let SkyNet win! Take this poll!
  23. Care and Feeding of Your TinyCNC Drawing Robot
  24. Maker Faire 2016 Drawing Robot Presentation Slides
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